


if we're being honest

by nyaheato



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Angst, M/M, Reunion, Sort Of, rated teen for one (1) swear word, that's mostly what this is, the boys talk it out, theyre like 16, whale island
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:40:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28474812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nyaheato/pseuds/nyaheato
Summary: Gon blinks once, twice, licks his lips before speaking.“I never left you.” It comes out rough and quiet.Whipping around incredulously, Killua gapes at him. “Are you serious?” A breeze gusts around them and he shivers. Nights on Whale Island are colder than he’d remembered.
Relationships: Gon Freecs & Killua Zoldyck, Gon Freecs/Killua Zoldyck
Comments: 18
Kudos: 116





	if we're being honest

**Author's Note:**

> this is soooo self indulgent and messy and possibly ooc omg, it's basically just a word vomit of things i want killugon to say to each other and somehow i was still not able to include everything i wanted to. lol they destroy me
> 
> anyway i hope you enjoy my take on their Issues™ and a potential reunion conversation (post immense character development that allows them to say all this stuff out loud, of course. but i’m not here to write that <3)

“I guess, for me, you were kind of the only light in my life.”

The night rests heavy around them, the words swallowed up by the moon and the fire crackling behind. Killua feels them evaporate in front of him, the weight lifted away from him even as he feels Gon’s eyes burning a hole in the side of his face.

“You were the one thing I had to hold on to, no matter what. But you kept getting further and further away from me.”

Raising his hand to the sky, Killua frames the moon between his fingers, peering at the odd light. He closes them into a fist and it disappears.

“I knew it was only a matter of time before you went somewhere I couldn’t follow. Before you woke up and realized what I was and what you were. But I still wanted you to stay.”

Gon blinks once, twice, licks his lips before speaking. 

“I never left you.” It comes out rough and quiet. 

Whipping around incredulously, Killua gapes at him. “Are you serious?” A breeze gusts around them and he shivers. Nights on Whale Island are colder than he’d remembered.

Gon tilts his head and his eyes soften, dark and thick. “Killua, I’m trying really hard. And I like to think that I’m pretty good at reading you. But I can’t read your mind, so I need you to help me out and explain what you mean.” 

He says it like it’s an obvious truth, or something they’d talked about before. Gon had always been perceptive, but he’d never tried to see beyond his own scope of vision unprompted. Tunnel vision. 

Killua wonders if Gon had seen the way he used to stare when the sunlight hit his body just right and washed everything away gold. If he’d grasped the redundancy of Killua’s sympathetic tears, over and over. Or had he been too caught up in his own grief, his own light, his own love?

Were they ever really separate? Killua wonders if he’d misremembered this, too.

Looking down, Killua grabs a fistful of grass, crushes it, lets it fall through his fingers. “Do you remember that time we played dodgeball. Against Razor.” It isn’t a question.

Gon nods, lips stretching minutely. Killua doesn’t miss it, even out of the corner of his eye.

“You remember… What you said to me,” he mumbles, feeling embarrassed and small just for remembering. “About holding the ball.”

“Of course I remember,” Gon says, and now he is smiling. “Tsezguerra wanted to hold the ball for me, but I told him it had to be you. You were the only one who could hold it for me.”

“Jeez, you didn’t have to go and say it again,” Killua says, and normally thinking about those words would hurt him, but seeing Gon saying them again, smiling, not a hint of disdain or bitterness or, god forbid, regret on his face turns something inside of Killua that had firmly slotted into place and hadn’t moved since he’d left Kite behind in NGL. Gon couldn’t know.

“I remember you looked really happy,” Gon adds with the sort of wistful fondness that one might reserve for a treasured memory of a long-passed loved one.

“Yeah, well. I was happy, because that was what I wanted to do for you. I wanted to be useful for you. I wanted—I wanted you to need me.” Killua looks down, stares hard at the dirt.

“When you said that, it felt like you were choosing me. And what happened to my hands… It was like proof that it was okay. If I stayed.” He breathes in deep and shaky, and the dirt and his shoes swim and warp in front of him, Gon’s face melting into something indistinguishable and distant in his peripheral vision. The moon drips.

“That’s why, when you went to fight Pitou, all by yourself…” He sucks in a breath. “In the end, I wasn’t trying to save you. I had already given up on that. I just went there to die by your side. But I couldn’t even do that.”

“Killua.”

“Killua. Look at me.”

Jolting, Killua rubs at his eyes vigorously with his sleeve, turning to face Gon beside him.

“It had nothing to do with you,” Gon says firmly. His eyes are dark but they glitter in the moonlight and it isn’t like the last time. Killua feels his heart seize in his chest regardless.

“How can you say that? Again? And after you apologized, too—”

“Listen to me. That’s not what I meant.” Gon looks down and his expression folds into something sad and heavy.

“What I said to you in the palace… It was awful and I shouldn’t have said it to you. Of course you were hurting, too. Because it was me.

“But fighting Pitou was my burden. It was my fault Kite died, not yours. I failed, so—so I had to make up for it. It didn’t make sense for you to come with me.” 

Gon closes his eyes.

“I would kill Pitou, and I would destroy myself doing it, and then maybe I would’ve been enough. Maybe I would’ve been worth it.” The words emerge still and hang in the air like breath on a cold day.

Killua stares. Gon opens his eyes, facing straight ahead.

“So, it didn’t have anything to do with you. I wasn’t—I wasn’t rejecting you. If anything, I was protecting you. I never wanted to hurt you, Killua. And I’m sorry, ‘cause I guess I did.

“But, right now, if I could go back again and choose between going to fight Pitou alone or bringing you with me, I wouldn’t change my decision,” Gon says, pinning Killua with his head-on stare. The intensity in his eyes burns and his face shifts in Killua’s vision, the world settling into something different and better and more real.

“Okay,” he says, and it hurts a little bit.

“Okay?”

“Yeah. I understand. I definitely don’t agree, but I get it now.” Killua sighs. “I mean, if I could choose, I would go with you for sure.”

Gon’s eyes flick away from his, brow furrowing. “Maybe,” he says, “but I think… I think that might be bad, Killua. I think that you probably shouldn’t want to give up everything just for me.”

Killua laughs. “Are _you_ really trying to give _me_ mental health advice? After everything you just said?”

Meeting Killua’s gaze again, Gon gives him a rueful smile, eyes soft. “I guess not.”

Comfortable silence creeps between them, the night moving around them as they sit still, looking at the stars.

“We’re pretty fucked up, aren’t we?” Killua says, not without humor.

“I guess so,” Gon replies. “I like you, though.”

“Huh? I’d sure hope so.”

Gon leans back, smiling, and Killua watches as something like a wall or a window drops away behind his eyes.

“I mean, we can be messed up together, right?”

Killua swallows, looking away. “You were never mine the way I was yours.”

Gon’s eyes are boring a hole in the side of his face again and, oh, right, he should probably look. When he does, Gon’s eyes are wide and washed silver in the moonlight.

“You never asked.”

Killua swallows again, mouth suddenly dry. “Well, maybe I’m asking now.”

The air presses in suddenly, the world narrowing to the maybe two feet of space between him and Gon, everything else going quiet and fuzzy and Gon’s hand on his upper arm. 

Killua watches as Gon’s face grows and swallows up his field of vision, holding his breath, heart pounding. He slows with a few inches left between them, eyes bright and anguished, and Killua can hear him breathing, can see their breaths overlap in the dark and the cold. It has always been like this.

Gon’s hand moves up to touch Killua’s cheek and his head moves downward to press into his shoulder and his arms slide around Killua’s neck and he clutches at his back. Killua feels tears seeping through his shirt. His heart is still pounding. He shivers and returns the embrace.

“We’ll be okay?” Gon asks pitifully.

Killua chokes out a wet laugh and tightens his arms around Gon’s torso, and it’s answer enough.

**Author's Note:**

> *never shuts the fuck up about the dodgeball scene*
> 
> thanks for reading and i hope you enjoyed! kudos and especially comments are much appreciated!!! <3


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